28 BEHIND THE FRONT PAGE
of detail and cable it as fast as possible. Our United Press of-
fice staff at that time in London was short, and hundreds of
newspapers were depending upon us alone for news. I rushed
out of the office to the Cunard Line office, to find a crowd
gathering there eager for information. "Underground" as the
first hint had been, it had spread like wildfire. All London
seemed to know that the great, graceful ocean greyhound,
pride of a maritime nation, lay at the bottom of the Irish
Sea. It only remained to know how many of her complement
—1917 souls, passengers and crew—were dead, and how
many were living.
The Cunard Line could tell nothing. Clerks were mute,
under orders. The early story written around the crowds of
people besieging the shipping offices of London for news was
the tale of pathos written hundreds of times. Here were fash-
ionably dressed relatives and friends of first-class passengers.
Here was an aged woman with a shawl over her head who
cried, "My son is a steward on that ship!" Here was a man in
a top hat who fumed that he would have news or know the
reason why. We cabled it all.
But the most dramatic international news story the war had
furnished up to that time remained hundreds of miles away
at the little port of call, Queenstown, Ireland. This was the
spot on which the eyes of the world were to focus for the next
few days. A conversation with my chief, Ed. L. Keen, general
European manager for the United Press, elicited the fact that
he had assigned me to get to Queenstown with all possible
speed.
This meant getting together every available pound and
shilling of cash at an hour when London banks had closed for
the day. A hurried invoice of office cash box and office pockets
yielded ten pounds. With this I jumped into a taxicab for
Paddington Station. It was my first big story in Europe, and